Divested Interest: Exchange Dialogues with Cogâ•nate Collective & Jay Lynn Gomez

Curated by Martha Lourdes Rocha & Emily D. A. Tyler

Saturday, May 4 – Sunday, July 14, 2013

Conversations #4

Saturday, May 4, 2013, 6 – 7 p.m.

Join the curators for an informal discussion with the artists as part of GCAC’s ongoing public program event series Conversations.

Opening Reception

Saturday, May 4, 2013, 7 – 10 p.m. during the Downtown Santa Ana Art Walk

Closing Reception (TBD)

Divested Interest: Exchange Dialogues with  Cog•nate Collective  &  Jay Lynn Gomez  features artistic exchanges, interruptions and interventions by artists  Misael Diaz  and  Amy Sanchez  of Cog•nate  Collective and artist Jay Lynn Gomez.   The artists have been invited to Grand Central Art Center to create artwork that is responsive to the current social climate, built environment and locational identity of Santa Ana through an ongoing series of installations, interviews and workshops.   GCAC will transform into a space of exchange, an open forum to discuss dialogues about gentrification.   Both gallery installations and site-specific works aim to explore labor and migration in Southern California.   Through strategies of Urban Interventionism, the artists will create a current critical analysis of social, economic and cultural situation within historic downtown Santa Ana.

To stimulate community participation and create new awareness of social issues, Gomez will place a series of painted cardboard cutouts into various public spaces, an extension of her  Happy Hills, Beverly Hills series. Gomez utilizes materials of protest, found and repurposed cardboard, to make visible the invisible plight of an often-overlooked Latino workforce. Also included in the exhibition are 20 torn out pages of luxury home magazines, hand painted to include figures of the laborers charged with maintaining these polished domestic environments. As a former live-in nanny, Gomez pulls from personal experience challenging viewers to see what she has seen. She interrupts the communities in which she works to bring to light candid moments of social divide.

An installation of Something to do with Crossing€ ¦ by Cog•nate Collective will introduce an informal system of exchange in the exhibition space that replicates the same actions occurring in border towns. Visitors are encouraged to exchange a photograph of clothing hanging on a clothesline for an article of their own that will take its place – the articles left will be donated by the artists to charities.

Cog•nate will also conduct interviews with local activists, artists and shop owners about recent and ongoing transformations in historic downtown Santa Ana. The interviews will be recorded and played within the gallery and around the downtown area using a mobile listening station equipped with an FM radio transmitter.In addition to the interviews, Cog•nate’s project will take the form of a series of workshops inside of the exhibition space with interviewees, artists, and the general public about issues relating to gentrification. The objective of these workshops will be to stage a performance or intervention at the end of the exhibition. The specific form and tactics of this final act will be developed through the workshops and will aim to further engage political and economic policy makers dictating the current and future direction of Santa Ana.